20010917

I think i’ve finally succeeded in completely getting rid of all affixes and making this what i set out to create: a language where words exist in and of themselves without mutating, morphing, changing, shifting, or anything else. Kind of like chinese, in a way, but much more malt§έgjèsque! Of course that does away with my ever so poetic mlàwarán, but such is life.

All prepositions are now to be considered separate words. I know, there goes the whole idea that started this language in the first place, but oh well. I’ll probably be adding some consonants to a few of them as well. Prepositions will, however, still follow the word they modify. The prefix ac- for the plural will now become a separate particle, but will not be needed if a number is included in the sentence.

The short list of particles thus far, which is certain to grow as the language expands and i find new and exciting things to do with them, is as follows:

dyd

past

dyd narám jơg

i wrote

cwarþ

perfect

cwarþ narám jơg

i have written

blai

progressive

blai narám jơg

i am writing

nag

future

nag narám jơg

i will write

lơ

subjunctive

lơ narám jơg

(that) i (may) write

rac

passive

dyd rac narám clag

the book was written

§lþ

interrogative

§lþ dyd narám pul clag að?

did he write the book?

ac

plural

dyd narám pul lεxέt ac clag(but) dyd narám pul dan clag

he wrote many books.
he wrote seven books.

So let’s talk sentence structure for a minute here. I know we’ve been through this before, but i just want to solidify some things. Okay, basic structure is VSO, but depending on prepositions can be VOS. Let’s add to that. PVSO has become apparent in dealing with the verbs, but should there be an order to the particles themselves? Actually, that’s something that has to be determined by the individual particle i suppose. For instance, dyd must precede cwarþ, because otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense. That would be like the difference between ‘he had gone’ and ‘he has went.’ I think i would like to see §lþ remain close to the verb, though, so we’ll say tentatively that §lþ must directly precede the verb. Ach, i’m starting to have flashbacks to those notorious ‘donkey tables’ in 9th grade french class... at least that’s what my teacher called them. She was a little weird though. (Ya know, cause the pronouns end in ‘y – en’...get it?...Ya know where you do the direct object pronouns and they go ‘me/te/se – le/la/les – lui/leurs – y – en’...okay, nevermind.)

Okay, so...

dyd - lơ – nag - cwarþ – blai – rac - §lþ - V – ac - S – ac - O

I’m not exactly sure why i put lơ where i did, but it seemed to make some sort of sense at the time.

Okay, nuff o dat. Let’s talk prepositions for a moment. They have heretofore all had an initial vowel so that they could be easily tacked onto the ends of nouns and pronouns. But now that i have sundered them, i think some can stand a few consonants to weight them down a little. We wouldn’t want any prepositions floating around on us, now, would we? But actually, that’s something i’ll work on gradually, because most of them seem to work quite nicely as they are. I still particularly like έloì.

Speaking of prepositions, i’ve decided to give one of them a bit of a rest. I’m still being way too anal about ‘u,’ and i have to get over this compulsion to genetivize everything! I mean, we can still keep it around for special occasions, but a simple combining of nouns can work just as well. I think i’ll keep it around for direct possession for the time being. So ‘the dlatci language’ will lose it’s u (dlát§i glơd) but ‘the man’s house’ will keep it (hanác u márga).

Back to particles, though, there are many particles to be found right in amongst the prepositions, like the lovely way we turn hunger into hungry with a simple oc or εm. Not sure what my point was, but i thought it was nice.